The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and do not necessarily constitute prior art.
An ultrasound imaging system is widely used in a medical field to acquire internal information of a subject by using a reflected signal obtained by transmitting an ultrasound to the subject and receiving a signal reflected from the inside of the subject. The ultrasound imaging system is a sophisticated electronic system that requires acquisition and realtime process of multichannel ultrasound signals. In particular, a digital beamforming constitutes the most operation-intensive functional block in the ultrasound imaging system, which is designed based on a hard-wired structure, e.g., ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) and FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). In recent years, with a rapid development of software processing, particularly a parallel core processor, including a general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) and a Many Integrated Core (MIC) processor, has enabled making attempts to implement such hardware functions with software.
Such a software-based ultrasound imaging system processes ultrasound data acquired in realtime on a host apparatus that is run on an operating system operating in a non-realtime basis, and in this sense, the issue is to design a scheme for transmitting the ultrasound data and processing the same in guaranteed real-time.